An “eerily poignant novel” about a grieving father and a cold-case mystery, from an Edgar Award winner (PublishersWeekly, starred review). George Gates used to be a travel writer who specialized in places where people disappeared—Judge Crater, the Lost Colony. Then his eight-year-old son was murdered, the killer never found, and Gates gave up disappearance. Now he writes stories of redemptive triviality about flower festivals and local celebrities for the town paper, and spends his evenings haunted by the image of his son’s last day. Enter Arlo McBride, a retired missing-persons detective still obsessed with the unsolved case of Katherine Carr. When he gives Gates the story she left behind—a story of a man stalking a woman named Katherine Carr—Gates too is drawn inexorably into a search for the missing author’s brief life and uncertain fate. And as he goes deeper, he begins to suspect that her tale holds the key not only to her fate, but to his own. “Every Thomas H. Cook novel is a subtle mind game, but The Fate of Katherine Carr is positively haunting.” —The New York Times Book Review “Disturbing, psychologically complex . . . At each level, the novel ponders questions of good and evil, of guilt and retribution, and the power of storytelling itself.” —Associated Press

Elder William Wentworth was living at Exeter, New Hampshire, by 1639, and at Wells, Maine, from 1642-1649. In 1649, he moved to Dover, New Hampshire, where he lived most of the rest of his life. He was the father of at least eleven children. He died at Dover ca. 1696/7. Descendants lived in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusettes, New York, Vermont, Illinois, and elsewhere.

Since the murder of his eight-year-old son, George Gates has written local stories for the town paper. A former travel writer, once he specialized in writing about places where people disappeared, sometimes individuals, sometimes whole societies. Since the tragedy, he plays it small and safe. Then he hears about Katherine Carr, a woman who vanished twenty years before. She left nothing behind but a few poems and a bizarre story. It is this story that spurs Gates to inquire into its missing author's brief life and dire fate, an exploration that leads him to discoveries about life and death, mystery and resolution.

A magazine of tales, travels, essays, and poems.

John Evans was born 11 January 1798 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His parents were Josiah Evans and Rebecca Locke. He married Frances Augusta Jane Knight (1811-1884), daughter of James Knight and Elizabeth, 24 June 1828, in Waynesboro, Georgia. They had eleven children. Descendants and relatives lived mainly in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Ohio and Texas.